Fictionalizing the Holocaust: Narrative Strategies and Elements of Denial

The paper will deal with the fictional strategies employed to empower the historical fact of the Holocaust in the following movies: Life is beautiful by Roberto Benigni, The Zookeeper’s Wife by Niki Caro and Inglorious Basterds by Quentin Tarantino. The aforementioned movies have been selected because each of them provides a different representation of the Holocaust: what is more, the Holocaust plays only a backdrop (or is represented pretty mildly) whereas the plot of the movie is concerned with something other than it. Simultaneously, the Jews in the movies are often being stereotyped or inadequately represented (as in Life is beautiful), marginalized (the main role in the movie is given to the Christian saviours, such as in The Zookeeper’s Wife), or are almost equalized with the Nazis (as in the Inglorious Basterds, the Jews being prone to committing the same atrocities and crimes in the act of revenge against the Nazis as the Nazis themselves). The paper will try to determine whether these movies in truth possess the elements of Holocaust denial, or whether it is about an idiosyncratic Holocaust representation.